propriate to the papal pretensions and the papal corruptions of the present day. Every student of the papal controversy should make himself familiar with it; and he can scarcely read it too often. A brief abstract of it is given by D'Aubigné (vol. ii. pp. 85-96. Am. ed.); but to feel its full power, it must be read, not in abstract or translation, but in the glowing and winged words of Luther himself.

It was Luther's declaration of war against all ecclesiastical tyranny; and a most noble and courageous declaration it is. The effect of it was visible in the whole subsequent history of the Reformation. It was a new thing, a point to which Luther himself had never expected to come, to appeal from the clergy to the laity in spiritual things, and to make religion a matter of general interest and common sense, rather than a sacred esoterism of which ecclesiastics alone could be the judges. The rights of every Christian as a king and priest under the new dispensation, are here clearly vindicated; and the awful, indelible character of the priesthood as claimed then and since, and the three strong walls, as the author calls them, of the papal usurpations, are entirely demolished.

Luther was writing this while the bull of excommunication. against him was under advisement at Rome, and the two pieces were published very nearly together. But the times had already changed. Moral and intellectual power was becoming stronger than mere ecclesiastical or physical might. The papal fulminations fell harmless to the ground, while Luther's tract shook the world like a thunderbolt from heaven.

Luther vigorously followed up this tremendous stroke. In a few weeks after, he published his Sermon on the mass (Lomler, i. 238-243); and in October his effective tract On the Babylonian captivity of the church, and his magnificent Sermon on the freedom of a Christian man, which last he sent to the pope with an elaborate letter, the third which he wrote to that dignitary. These are not inferior to his address to the German nobility; they nearly completed the Reformation, so far as the principle is concerned; and they will richly reward attentive and repeated study. They are briefly noticed by D'Aubigné, (vol. ii. pp. 110-122,) and can be read at large, except the first, in von Gerlach, iv. 67–v. 47.

In his Address to the nobility, Luther had exposed principally the external oppressiveness of the papal power, had shown the monstrous political and social evils it had inflicted, especially on

Germany; and he called upon his countrymen to shake off so intolerable a yoke. In his book on the Babylonian captivity of the church, he attacks more directly the internal source and spring of these external oppressions; he shows how the papacy, by its doctrine of the sacraments, multiplying them, making them essential to salvation, and claiming that they could be administered only by its own consecrated priests, and when so administered were of themselves efficacious to salvationhad inclosed the souls of men as it were in a net, and held almost all Christendom in a worse than Babylonian captivity. He shows the entire unscripturalness and absurdity of all these pretensions; he proves that in Scripture there are but two sacrainents,-baptism and the Lord's supper; that a living faith, and not the indelible character in the ministering priest, is essential to give efficacy to those sacraments, that the laity are entitled to the cup as well as the bread in the Lord's supper; and that the idea that the efficacy of baptism is destroyed by mortal sin subsequently committed, and that consequently the sacrament of penance is necessary in such cases, as the "second plank after a shipwreck," is entirely groundless, and the invention of men. He also exposes the unscriptural folly of transubstantiation, baptismal regeneration, the mass as a sacrifice, and monastic vows.

It was this work which called into the field of controversy that overgrown wen of pedantry, brutishness, cruelty, and all abominations, Henry VIII. of England, and gained for him at the hand of the pope, the proud title of Defender of the Faith. "True," said Luther, when he read the royal treatise, "it is a lion's skin, but there is nothing but an ass under it; and I shall strip the donkey of his covering, and give him such a beating, that he'll never bray again:" a promise which he most faithfully fulfilled.

[To be continued.

ARTICLE II.

ON THE POSITION OF MAN IN THE SCALE OF ORGANIC CREATION.

By Samuel Forry, M. D., Author of the "Climate of the United States and its Endemic Influences," Editor of the "New-York Journal of Medicine," etc.

In the number of this Journal for July last, we attempted to demonstrate, on the principle that Revelation and Science are both beams of light emitted from the same Sun of Eternal Truth, that the Mosaic account of the unity of the human race, finds the fullest confirmation in the facts revealed by the scientific investigation of the natural history of man, conducted upon the strict rules of modern inductive reasoning. We there demonstrated, as we conceive, that those lines of demarcation, which pride and ignorance have set up between man and man, as regards physical formation and moral and intellectual faculties, have no foundation in nature; thus not only confirming, what was to the readers of the Repository a work of supererogation, the truth of Holy Writ, but justifying the eloquent pleadings of those gifted, and some of them inspired, men, who, seeing far in advance of their own generation, have, at various times, proclaimed the doctrine that the whole human race is but one family, entitled alike to equal justice and liberty.

The present article may be, therefore, regarded as a continuation of the former; and in this sequel, our effort will be to point out the distinguishing peculiarities of man-the essential characteristics of humanity, independent of the light of revealed truth.

Preliminary to a survey of the general subdivisions of the animal kingdom, it may be well to refer to the distinction between animals and plants-a chain united by the most gradual and undistinguishable transition. It is true that we are in no danger of confounding a rhinoceros with a palm; but, as we approach the opposite extremity of the scale, so completely do the distinguishing characters of each kingdom successively disappear, leaving those alone which seem common to both, that there are many tribes which the present state of our knowledge cannot assign with certainty to either division. Notwithstanding this difficulty in drawing a line of distinction in individual cases, it does not follow that no boundary exists. Accustomed

to regard plants as beings, devoid of the power of spontaneous motion, and passing, alike unconscious of pleasure and of pain, through the processes of growth, reproduction, and decay, we look, on the other hand, upon animals as beings endowed with the additional functions of voluntary moving from place to place, and of being conscious of surrounding impressions. But notwithstanding the apparent correctness of this definition, there are many tribes, as for instance the sponge, which defy its application.

Various attempts have been made to erect a distinction between the animal and vegetable kingdoms; as, for example, the mode in which the first development of the germ occurs,the existence or non-existence of a stomach or internal cavity for the reception of food,-or, thirdly, the nature of the respiratory process. But a consideration of these topics would be here out of place.

Let us, however, at the same time, advert to those striking relations that exist between these two kingdoms of living nature-the sources whence they derive their elementary constituents, the changes that they unceasingly cause in the inorganic world, as well as their mutual dependencies and reciprocal

actions.

So great is the elemental simplicity of organized matter, that all the countless diversities in the form, structure, and visible appearances of the glorious mechanisms of animal and vegetable life, are made up of a few simple constituents, ultimately resolvable into oxygen and nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon, with some earthy or saline matter. Indeed, there is not an element composing the constitution of an animal body, which is not found in the mineral or inorganic kingdom. As no inorganic substances can supply nourishment to an animal, it necessarily follows that the vegetable creation must have preceded that of animal beings-a deduction in beautiful accordance with the disclosures of revealed truth. Having thus been necessary to the very existence and support of animal life, the vegetable kingdom is still obviously the connecting link between the animal and mineral kingdoms; for, the plants upon which animals subsist, have the power of assimilating the inorganic elements around them into their own organized structures. As the bones abound in earthy matter, as iron is always present in the blood, and as many of the other fluids are rich in various salts, so these same inorganic materials exist in the vegetable food on which

animals live. As regards every living thing, how emphatically true is it, then, that "dust it is, and unto dust it shall return." The same elementary matters, differently arranged, now exist in the inert soil, now bloom in the flower, or anon incorporated with a living frame, become instinct with vitality-the organs of mind and intelligence; and thus, in the ever-recurring cycle of life and death-the law of formation and dissolution impressed upon all organic existence-we behold the decay of one generation but supplying the elements requisite for the development of its successor.

Let us now take a hasty glance at the cistinctive characters of the animal kingdom, of which man is a member. Formerly this kingdom was divided into two primary groups, the Vertebrata and the Invertebrata. The former comprised those animals which are characterized by a jointed spinal column consisting of a number of distinct bones, termed vertebræ, while the invertebrated class are all devoid of this support. The defect of this primary division soon, however, became obvious in the want of a third fundamental idea essential in a classificatory science, which is that of proportion or relation in the primary groups; and the effort to remedy this imperfection led to the important discovery, that the spinal column is a modification of structure subordinately connected with an organic system of much higher importance in the animal economy than the skeleton, viz., the nervous system. In the prosecution of a long series of minute and elaborate dissections, the zoologists finally discovered three modifications of the nervous system, all of which were not less important than that relative to which a cranium and vertebral column are dependent and subordinate. In view of these four distinct types of organization, Cuvier proposed to divide the animal kingdorn into as many provinces or sub-kingdoms; and these primary divisions he designated in the descending order of their development, Vertebrata, Articu lata, Mollusca, and Radiata, the last comprising those animals that border closely on the vegetable kingdom.

However valuable a detailed account of the general characters of these four sub-kingdoms might prove, in the way of illus trating the closely connected links of the chain of animal existence, from the lowest point, which blends inseparably with the vegetable kingdom, up to the highest, terminating in the perfection of the human structure, we must, in consideration of the elementary nature of these facts, here forego their description.